Wow, a card!

Look! Something other than text!

Ultimately, I plan to use fanart for all of the cards. There are some badass fan artists out there, and I'd rather display their talent than official stuff.

I wanted a lot of nostalgia in these cards, and that's why they have the old school blue menu screen for a template. I like the 3 classes for traits too, but it reminds me of 8-bit theater.

I've currently done 12 of these cards, but I need to get the OK from the artists to publicly post them. This one's ok because this is official Square-Enix art. (If I got a cease and desist from Square-Enix I'd probably hang it on my wall.)

Here is an example of the general look for character cards. I have the character's name, with a title included (So I can also make cards like Cecil: Dark Knight... This is probably my favorite thing about the VS card game.)

The upper right hand corner is where the character's class goes, in this case, Cecil is a fighter. (True, he's got magic, but since his main job is being a human shield, I thought he fit a little better into the fighter category.)

Then we get the trait bar. Cecil has the "White" trait, which doesn't mean he's an Aryan warrior, it means he can use White Magic. The "Black" and "White" magic keywords also grant resistance. (I.e. as long as a character with the "Black" keyword is standing, he is immune to all "Black" magic cards. This doesn't work on Summons though, they'll ruin your shit regardless of who you are.)

Also note that Cecil's ability will eventually be "leader only" I'm working on a uniform way to display effects that are passive, (i.e. always on) triggered, and whether or not those abilities are only useable when one is the leader, like Cecil's ability will be in the final product.

I consider Cecil to be the Captain America of Final Fantasy, there's no greater leader than one that fights on the front lines and would give his life for you.

Anyway, on paper, that's a devestating ability, coupled with Cecil's good defense (most fighters have 1600 attack) you might not be able to do anything while you're getting ranged attacked every turn.

This is a great opportunity to point out my #1 pet peeve with card games. Emulating the source material. There is a VS card of Two-Face which is something like "Flip a coin, heads destroy target character." Wow, some serious design thought there. I think good design involves structuring a character around the game, not the other way around. You want to give them an ability useful to the game, but have it also capture their essense. In this incarnation, Cecil is a tank, you can't get around him, but he doesn't literally cover certain characters and take damage for them.

And them of course, we have the attack icon (Moogle with the Sword) defense (Moogle Shield) and flavor text (One again, not literally.)

And I'd like to take the time to thank all that have read so far. Comments are most definitely welcome. This is only the 2nd card game I've worked on, and the 1st one was horrendous, so your feedback is definitely welcome.